Mobile Duron is a placeholder

A news item on TechWeb gives a comparison of the mobile Duron in the notebook marketplace, and analysts refer to them as placeholders. I'd tend to agree with that, as they are just breaking open the market and holding the spot for the next generation mobile Duron, which should have much lower power dissipation. The only apparent difference between a desktop and mobile Duron is that the voltage has been reduced from 1.6 volts to 1.4 volts. The current mobile Duron is not only still power hungry (20-24 watts max compared to 14 watts max for other mobile chips), it also lacks AMD's PowerNow! feature that the newest mobile K6-2 supports. The mobile K6-2 still has a marketshare of 20% in the mobile marketplace even though it tops out at 550MHz. The mobile Duron kicks that up to 600 and 700MHz, but the only laptop announced with the chip is NEC's LaVie U, which will not even sell in North America. AMD's mobile Duron is to the notebook market what Intel's Pentium 4 currently is to the desktop market. It's a clunky chip that won't win huge marketshare, but in limited quantities it will establish a foothold that AMD can build on in the future with their next mobile Duron release.